songs in the key of my life

Tag Archives: navratri

here are some shorts i wrote on the Q train this afternoon, i was on my way to nyu’s italian house, for a seminar class i’ve been digging, called italian masculinity in 1920’s american cinema. enjoy.

west coasting
cube instrumental on the ears easy
brooklyn bridge on the eyes
freely

the subtle knife
all this warrior work
and i am descending
into subtler spaces
the subtle knife
pulling for windows
into new worlds

fort hamilton
sister adorers of
the precious blood
graveyard day laborers
under a tree for the flood
watch cemetery turn fall
red and yellow
above them all

october
family is a joke
in the morning one tiny toke
eliminate waste
preliminary haste
to shake off the rage
of the morning
i woke up itching to fight
can’t barely control the tide
like a part of me died
buried alive
still seething
rage is the only breath
im still breathing
avenger with feathers
to get her
together
i am nobody’s nightmare
not even in full flame
but only my own angel
basquiat said samo same

bikram yoga #1
halfway thru i always want to raise my hand
and say, excuse me, perhaps you haven’t noticed
but it’s hot in here
could you open a window
because my body can take it
but my mind can’t believe
pouring sweat like water through a sieve

bikram yoga #2
even my shin bone
is coursing with sweat
i am on my stomach
a river spills out from
the valley of my spine
one drop right, one drop left
i am on one leg
the river runs off my angles
elbows knees edges
drops fly off ledges
even my shin bone
is coursing with sweat

last night was part chipping away at midterms and part making magic in the moonlit hours of the santos dance floors. all us ladies were like honey to the beez. it beez that way sometimes. ?uest’s dj set was almost implausible, he was whipping up heady combos of hip hop gold and r&b love. and even though the yanks tanked, folks was out with smiles and cmj passes on.

tommy motola, lived long ago. we are so in synch tonight, suddenly me and him are two stepping to killah, that was after he tore down the cypher, after i turned out the cypha, but before he spun and dipped me into the crevices of hip hop canyons. downstairs was soca, aka wyn music, cept when “i am blessed” comes on, at which point even the rattiest of rats come back to queen, stop making out at coat check, picturing our moms praying and shit.

“When I get up all in ya/we could hear the angels calling us,” croons Bobby Valentino in his hit collabo with Lil Wayne. I can’t get enough of that “wee-oh-wee-oh-wee,” Bobby Valentino takes his lines to the bottom of his heart. The song is Lil Wayne’s homage to a “lady cop” he’s diggin on, a lyrical story bolstered with one line zingers like, “I asked her for her number, she said 9-1-1.” Sensual and fun, the song alludes to that tipping point moment when powerful women let themselves need. Which is something I wish Palin would do.

I wish Palin would let her hair down, get empathetic, be the change.

Take for example, last night’s Vice Presidential debate (only the 7th debate between VP candidates in U.S. history), there was this one moment when Biden choked up.

Biden broke like a cloud letting through a streak of sunlight. It was just after he embodied his working class father leaving the family to go find work, “Honey, I’ll send for you and the kids when I get enough money.” It was a bit before Biden shared a lesson he learned from an elder in the congressional game, “Question Judgment Not Motive.” It was when Biden was moved to speak about familiarity with loss, about his ailing son. A rewind moment. A sink into the heart of the man moment. Then the camera switches to Palin. And instead of acknowledging the depth of the moment, Palin plowed ahead with her “mavericks in Congress” high rotation sound bite. And I wondered. America seems ready for a masculine feminine figure in office. But is American ready for femininity?

Cuz you can have all the signs of being a woman–the kids, the warm tone of tough love–without championing the feminine sensibilities. Those sensibilities that give us a sixth sense for how to handle a flood, crash, death while staying low in our hips, unwinding our lips from the Durga ferocity that is our days to a slow sailing clip, mouth dripping gold, never getting old because our souls stay fed and feeding, healing all y’all bleeding, this is just the start, the next post is on Culture Wars, I write to you from my heart. Stay tuned.

Thank you for reading. And here’s to high expectations for all women, from Palin to lady cops to the women whose sons they shoot to kill.